Category Archives: Extent

According to the latest edition of the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s “Arctic Sea Ice News”

On March 17, 2018, Arctic sea ice likely reached its maximum extent for the year, at 14.48 million square kilometers (5.59 million square miles), the second lowest in the 39-year satellite record, falling just behind 2017. This year’s maximum extent is 1.16 million square kilometers (448,000 square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 average maximum of 15.64 million square kilometers (6.04 million square miles).

September has arrived once again, the month in which the assorted Arctic area and extent metrics (almost) always reach their respective annual minima. Now we can start to speculate about what the assorted minima will be, and on what date.

It’s far too early to be sure about this yet, but it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that the 2017 maximum is already in place. Here’s our favourite high resolution extent graph calculated by “Wipneus” from University of Hamburg/JAXA AMSR2 data:

As you can see, global sea ice extent has just reached the lowest ever level in the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s satellite records going back to 1979. It was over a month later when the previous record was broken in February 2016, so there is plenty of time for the metric to fall further.

Please forgive my mixing of metaphors this morning, but the interminable stream of piss poor propaganda from Tony Heller grows ever more voluminous. Not only has he reprised his “DMIGate” nonsense but he is also posting pictures of the wrong bit of the Arctic yet again. Exhibit A:

In the latest edition of their “Arctic Sea Ice News” the United States’ National Snow and Ice Data Center have announced that:

Arctic sea ice appears to have reached its annual maximum extent on March 24, and is now the lowest maximum in the satellite record, replacing last year’s record low. This year’s maximum extent occurred later than average. A late season surge in ice growth is still possible. NSIDC will post a detailed analysis of the 2015 to 2016 winter sea ice conditions in early April.

Our title for today is a reference back to a 2015 article by Paul Homewood on his “Not A Lot Of People Know That” blog, in which he told a load of old porky pies about the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s graphs of Arctic sea ice extent. Only last week Mr. Homewood cooked up another pile of porky pies concerning the Danish Meteorolical Institute’s Arctic sea ice extent metric. Now he has turned his pie baking skills to the Multisensor Analyzed Sea Ice Extent (MASIE for short), which is “a prototype collaborative product of the National Ice Center and NSIDC”.